And look at how File::Tail implements the tail too. You'll learn a lot about perl from digging through this one. I have special love for this question because it was the one that sent me to c.l.p.m all those years ago. Imagine my surprise when I flip thru the group and spot authors of actual books that I own answering questions =)

Luckily, someone else had already asked the question and been sent off to the Camel book. (look up seek). Once you've seen the cute little 5ish lines that it takes to do sketchy job of it, look in File::Tail at "sub position" and see how cool they are in handling all the cases and variations that we've never thought of.

This module is the other poster child (e.g. CGI) for for people who think they can do it better and write it more "efficiently" themselves.

Also, if your are going to use perl in the stream, it is often not worth it to use unix tools and pipe, once you are loading perl anyway, do the whole job in perl, you'll be happy later, promise.

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)